Re: [avrdude-dev] Atmel's XML part description files

[Erik Walthinsen]

E. Weddington wrote:
> While I appreciate the overall scope that this could apply, I would urge 
> a bit of caution, and see if we can just get one thing done at a time.
Agreed, I'm just throwing out the ideas so that they stick in people's 
minds and we don't design ourselves out of the possibility in the future.

> Adding this ability to avrdude would be a good first step. But, at the 
> very moment, it's not a critical feature to have. IMO, avrdude needs to 
> understand the stk500 version 2 protocol first. To get OT, avarice also 
> needs to understand the JTAG ICE mk II protocol too.
The problem is that I can't get stk500v2 working unless I get access to 
those several dozen numbers per part that only exist in the Atmel XML files.

One way or another they have to be made available, and from the little 
I've looked at the way avrdude.conf is handled, it'd make a lot more 
sense to replace it with XML.  Or at the very least redo the parsing so 
that it's a generic language instead of a very very token-specific 
language.  Each of the tags for a given parameter are currently 
hardcoded into the source, where they really should be treated as opaque 
names and put into a tag/value list for use by the various drivers. 
That's a change I'm not capable of making because I never have had any 
luck (or even much training) in actually implementing grammars.